In the religious life of India, after the Gupta period, the greatest vitality seems to have been found in the peninsula. Here certain south Indian Brahmans developed Hindu philosophy and theology as never before, and, basing their work on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras, produced commentaries of great length and subtlety, to defend their own systematic interpretations of the texts.
Chief of these was Sankaracharya, a Keralan Brahman of the ninth century, who has with some justification been called the St. Thomas Aquinas of Hinduism. Sankaracharya was only one of many teachers nearly as great as he, such as Ramanuja (died 1137) and Madhva (71197-1276), who founded sub-sects of the Vedanta philosophical school.
Perhaps even more important was the growth of simple popular devotional- ism (bhakti), which began among the Tamils near the beginning of this period with the production of the beautiful Tamil hymns of the Nayanars and Alvars.
Other products of the same movement were the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana, which, composed in the Tamil country, soon spread all over India and was later translated into the everyday languages, to diffuse the cult of Krishna as the divine lover. Before the Muslim conquest of the Deccan this movement had begun to spread northwards, and left its traces in the earliest important Marathi literature, such as the Jnanesvari of Jnanesvar.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Meanwhile Buddhism steadily lost ground, though it was still very much alive in Bengal and Bihar when the Muslims occupied these regions. Both Buddhism and Hinduism had become affected by what is generally known as Tantricism or Tantrism, emphasizing the worship of goddesses, especially the Mother Goddess, the spouse of Siva, known by many names.
With this came sexual mysticism, and the sacramentalization of the sexual act, which was performed ritually by circles of initiates. Other socio-religious practices, looked on as reprehensible by most modern Hindus, became more common in this period.
Among these were the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, wrongly called slat (suttee), child marriage, animal sacrifice, female infanticide, and the religious prostitution of the devadasi.
One feels that there was a definite lowering in the value of human life in comparison with the days of the Guptas, when, according to Chinese accounts, even the death penalty was not inflicted.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
When the Turkish horsemen swept through the Ganga plain, Hindu culture was tending to look inwards and backwards-inwards to the private fife of the spirit and backwards to the hallowed norms of the distant past. In many respects the legacy of this period to later times was a negative one.
Yet, in the spiring temples built during this period all over India, the age endowed posterity with monuments of enduring splendour and beauty. The parallel with the medieval period in western Christendom is a close one.
Here too there was in some respects a cultural decline, in comparison with the days of the great empire destroyed by the barbarians. But in this time new forms of religious literature and art appeared, as well as glorious monuments to faith such as the older empire could never have built.